eg. a quick search found a Ham radio group in SD: https://www.facebook.com/groups/856599821517281.
More Ham radio groups in San Diego (you can do a similar search for retro computing): https://www.facebook.com/search/groups?q=ham%20radio&filters...
Meetup also has some retro computing groups, though I don't see one in San Diego (why not start one?): https://www.meetup.com/topics/retro-computers/
(Caveat: I work on FB Groups)
To give a clear counterpoint to the idea of using Facebook groups - forums had anonymity. You could be a different version of yourself - for better or worse. It's not possible to do that on Facebook without accountability.
Sure it is. Our local town Facebook groups have a wide variety of clear sockpuppet accounts. Facebook's detection and processes for this are laughably bad; quite a few people have reported the "Count von Brokenhymen" style ones to no avail.
so sock puppet might not be as easy as it once was.
Both for false positives and false negatives. I had to register an account to participate in some local town stuff, and my account got locked every week, regular as clockwork.
You and your team members do really great work -- it's one of the only reasons many people still use Facebook. If you bail and create something that is more decentralized and web3, but with the same quality and consumer accessibility, it'd be a hit. And, you'll replace one super-voting-share emperor with a large community of crazy but well-meaning stakeholders, who are a lot more fun to work for.
Web3 is super interesting, and I'm excited to see it grow.
I used to be a "forum junkie", but FB Groups has completely replaced that behavior. I don't know if it's better or worse, but at least I am not checking 5 different forums anymore. The forums come to me.